Big J

They are hundreds of metres from shore and the ice is too thin to walk. First time I've ever seen them here, or indeed anywhere!

I really have no idea what's caused them! I've never seen offgassing from the lake at any time, and it was really very still and cold over the weekend when it froze. I shall do some research.

Back to winter again. Had a few inches of snow on Friday and frosts to minus 15 over the weekend. The lake refroze in the strangest way too. A friend flew a drone over and it revealed crater like ice circles. Anyone any idea how they've formed? I didn't add the music to the video by the way 😁 VID-20230206-WA0000.mp4

I did shop around a bit. It was the £150k subcontractors employers liability that took it up.

Yep, good point!

You do get some litter on the roads into villages - beer and energy drink cans and McDonalds mainly. Not as much as the UK by a long shot, but it still annoys me! I can't fathom the high insurance costs in the UK. Fair enough, there is a bit less of a chance here of machines being stolen or vandalised, but how can the public liability be so much lower? Perhaps because our work sites are so remote, you don't have any interaction with the public. For the lorry, the roads are huge and mostly traffic free, so less chance of an accident? But then there are a lot of moose and deer. Who knows?!

Insurance costs buttons here in Sweden Full insurance for our forwarder, V8 Scania lorry, public liability and employers liability costs £1020 a year. So £85 a month. It would be fully ten times that in the UK, as I remember my premium for employers, public, general tools and one forwarder was £7600.

Got down to minus 8,8c here last night. Was up on the ski slope helping with snow production.

Minus 3 here. It was that temperature all of yesterday too. It makes for pleasant winter weather - cold enough that everything is frozen, but not actually cold. The only issue is that it would be better if it was minus 5-8c. That way, the lake would freeze properly for skating and we'd be able to make snow on the ski slope (it has to be at least minus 4). The ice on the lake is only about 2-3cm thick. Well at least the bit around the sauna jetty was last night. Water was resolutely 0c. The photo is from a few days ago of our balcony and minus 6.

Yeah, I've asked the landowner to have a word with the cutter about the stacking. Very little professional hand cutting here. The H8 actually excels on very steep ground. There is individually controllable wheel articulation, with about 1 metre of vertical travel on each wheel. It allows it to stay level on steep slopes, as well as negotiating serious side slopes. I agree that it's not the best for soft ground, but it only weighs about 7-8t so it does quite well.

I will get some next week. It might be better to wait until we're on the next site, which is more of a commercial forestry block (as opposed to someone's back garden).

We did a bit of work in North Devon - Minehead and near Barnstaple. The access was a huge issue. The job at Minehead required a 1 mile uphill extraction through a 2.2m wide bridleway to the nearest point you could get a lorry to. And then, no haulier wants to take the timber away as it's in the middle of nowhere. You can get 60t lorries everywhere here. It's nice to not have to think about that anymore. On this site, handcut. It's a royal PITA. But 95% of our work will be following harvesters. There are loads of Rottne H8s around here (the factory is less than an hour away). It's a good matchup with our size of forwarder.

First day out with our forwarder today. It's been a long and difficult process to get started here. A combination of Swedish bureaucracy, Brexit nonsense and people owing me money and not wanting to pay. Anyway, I'm in partnership with a friend here now. He's German, lots of construction machine and lorry experience as well as being an excellent mechanic. He's new to the forest. Together, we can do a lot more than individually, and it's nice not to go it completely alone in a new country. We've started on a fairly complicated and difficult little site for a relative of a neighbour. Just testing the machine out really and it's doing well. Traction is very good, drive system nice, crane a bit sensitive and cabin lovely. It's a Novotny LVS 511. We move onto a normal commercial site next week. We have a 1992 Scania 143M to shift the machine around, which also has a sleeper cab for nights out. This site has one of the best locations of any house I've visited here. Just stunning, on the edge of a 9km long lake.